Hardcore Server & Few More Ideas

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I think players should be given the option to play this game with intended and expected settings and properly balanced. As these weren't addresses in last month, I think the best way would be to setup additional server and let players have it more challenging. It's just an idea but would solve the problems with current content that can be beaten in single day even with new account (and no one helping you if you know the game well). Also introducing few new features or changes that would help to improve the player experience.

So the ideas are roughly:

- only one piece of equipment can be preserved after death for free (no other items can be preserved, not even for paid currency)

- electrum is going to be purely for cosmetics and slots

- deep night theme active all the time, there is always night!

- enemy health increased to 500% of current values

- damage received increased by 50%, but there is cap for how much damage any player can receive in single hit and that's 90% (after all reductions are applied)

- experience gain adjusted accordingly (to 500% of current values) as stronger enemies should grant more experience to offset the difficulty and time required to get to level 25

- damage over time capped to never reduce player under 1 hp (so you will always have chance to survive as these effects cannot kill you directly, but anything else can finish you easily)... of course, while under effect of damage over time your regeneration doesn't work and if you get another poison effect before the first one ends or any other hit, it can kill you

- silver amount dropped by enemies increased by 1000%, the silver is now automatically collected in radius of 7 tiles and you see text popup saying how much you looted

- bosses are now dropping 50-100% of the silver value of average item price on that tier, same applies to quest bosses, but these are dropping only 10-20% of that amount

- Valr gained for non-Well activities increased to 1000% of current values (will make beginning a bit easier)

- add sources for first-tab relics and make these permanent (these should be giving bonuses for xp, crafting, etc... and it doesn't make sense to have these effects disappear after death)

- Well should get a bit slower when it comes to spawning enemies and Valr should be increased (to 500% of current value) to offset the higher difficulty of enemies

- new world drop (special orb) would allow players to summon Invasion portal in any place in the world (power of the instance would be based on area where you spawned it) and get in with another up to 10 players and do the Invasion together... this would give players more control and because the event would also have really good rewards, it would motivate players to do these events. The drop rate would be higher in the higher tiers and motivate players to actually fully clear t9 and t10 dungeons and these orbs (or similar rare items with actual use) could also be used as trading currency by stronger players for expressing value of valuable items (once secure trading window is implemented). The idea of drop rate is roughly 0.15% drop rate in t10, 0.075% in t9, 0.05 in t8 and it goes down to 0.01 in t1. It's world drop, so not only dungeons but anywhere and should be announced by sound when it drops and marked on minimap.

- amount of materials dropped in the world and dungeons decreased by 80%

- amount of materials dropped from chests increased by 100%, chests will now also drop small amount of Bloodstone (10 in t9 dungeons), but only 1 chest (randomly selected) has this drop in any single instance.

- imprints can be crafted. Players will require a lot of given tier materials (as you know, each imprint has tier of gear it can be used on) and Empty Scroll. Empty Scroll is new item that can drop from instance bosses (0.5% per tier, t10 is best for this as it has 3 bosses). It's also guaranteed reward for the final quest in the daily quest chain (can be done once per account per day).

- shrine teleport costs removed. It's rather annoying feature as everyone who spent more than hour in game will always have Silver for teleport. But most of the time he won't have it in bag and will have to hurry back to vault... just wasting time instead of playing.

- Auction House disabled. Also create secondary table where you log all dropped and crafted items with some unique item id. If the server ever sees event where player is dropping or re-rolling item that has not unique id or is missing in that table (source is unknown) or the timestamp seems to be off, just remove that item from game and mark the account for investigation. This might be bad idea, but if it seems to be hard to have one system working well, it makes sense to me to create another monitoring layer that makes sure that if cheating happens, it's detected and resolved immediately.

- instead of AH, create working trading window that allows exchange of any items the two parties agree on.

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I'd personally like to see most of these ideas even in the normal server.

Other suggestion would be to remove buying keys from npcs and disabling the key quests. Instead, have keys drop at a %rate from normal monsters in each region, and have the elites give a slightly higher % drop chance. This would actually give an incentive for players to kill stuff around the map vs in dungeons the entire time.

It is not a good idea to increase damage by 50%.
If you can remove all the Legacies or the overall repair 50%, it will be a great help to the game. Well, this should not appear in the early days of the game, I think he should be 3 months or half a year, the game is stable. Or if the monster is too strong, it needs to appear to help improve the Legacies level.
If you can understand, don't use any Legacies just T9 equipment and bring 10 bottles of HP to restore water at T10 solo, how it feels. (Although the drop is frustrating btw...)
Maybe you feel why you are wasting your time, but enjoying this process is definitely worth it.
Too many items that break the balance.
I don't know what the mindset is. I know that most players want to profit from it.
When I first entered the game on December 7th, I clicked on the player to watch his overall quality, and I knew that the balance had already been destroyed. (T10 equipped with 50LV legendary legacy, attacking 8XX defending 8XX and hitting 9XX Harb), but I was not Know how to do it.
When a player says that the game is so simple, I think why you don't ask any disruptive intelligence to the manager?
Cold eyes watching the game gradually collapse? If everyone thinks that the game is broken, what will happen is not related to me, I have to say that it will be very bad.
The closed player and the player who profited from it, think for themselves, although it is irrelevant to some people.

The team's commitment: non-essential, will not roll back.
This guarantee has been manipulated by the player.

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I'd echo Sephos sentiment about further fragmenting the player base. I'd love a fresh start, but I don't think the base could sustain.

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- only one piece of equipment can be preserved after death for free (no other items can be preserved, not even for paid currency)

- electrum is going to be purely for cosmetics and slots

I'd agree with these, if their financial model could incorporate it. Would you also purpose eliminating The Exchange?

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- deep night theme active all the time, there is always night!

Oh God, I have old man eyes. I don't think they could handle the strain!

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- silver amount dropped by enemies increased by 1000%, the silver is now automatically collected in radius of 7 tiles and you see text popup saying how much you looted

- bosses are now dropping 50-100% of the silver value of average item price on that tier, same applies to quest bosses, but these are dropping only 10-20% of that amount

I've said it elsewhere, but I'm not a huge fan of inflating silver from it's current levels. I'd rather see all the costs decreased and the sell prices lowered to bring it in line with the amount of silver mobs and bosses drop. Dealing in 6 figure+ currency values seems unnecessary.

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- enemy health increased to 500% of current values

- damage received increased by 50%, but there is cap for how much damage any player can receive in single hit and that's 90% (after all reductions are applied)

Increasing enemy health and damage is a possibility, but I feel like this is sidestepping some of the larger issues with the system.

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- experience gain adjusted accordingly (to 500% of current values) as stronger enemies should grant more experience to offset the difficulty and time required to get to level 25﻿

This is one area of the game I'm satisfied with. Or at least it seems to work well enough with so many other areas needing love, I wouldn't consider it much of a priority.

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- damage over time capped to never reduce player under 1 hp (so you will always have chance to survive as these effects cannot kill you directly, but anything else can finish you easily)... of course, while under effect of damage over time your regeneration doesn't work and if you get another poison effect before the first one ends or any other hit, it can kill you

I agree with the poison damage reducing health to one, but as I stated in other threads, poison damage needs a bit of a rework too. I could be wrong, but I don't think it needs any additional component to kill on a second hit, as all attacks that start a poison effect have some initial damage component.

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- Valr gained for non-Well activities increased to 1000% of current values (will make beginning a bit easier)

I STRONGLY agree that more valr needs to be added to non-well activities.

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- shrine teleport costs removed. It's rather annoying feature as everyone who spent more than hour in game will always have Silver for teleport. But most of the time he won't have it in bag and will have to hurry back to vault... just wasting time instead of playing.

I'd rather they just made the shrine pull silver from the vault, like everything else in the game.

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- amount of materials dropped from chests increased by 100%, chests will now also drop small amount of Bloodstone (10 in t9 dungeons), but only 1 chest (randomly selected) has this drop in any single instance.

HH seems pretty steadfast in their desire to keep Bloodstone at around 46 per day per account. I'd love to see how the 46 would play out in a fresh environment, but again, leery about breaking up the player base.

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- new world drop (special orb) would allow players to summon Invasion portal in any place in the world (power of the instance would be based on area where you spawned it) and get in with another up to 10 players and do the Invasion together... this would give players more control and because the event would also have really good rewards, it would motivate players to do these events. The drop rate would be higher in the higher tiers and motivate players to actually fully clear t9 and t10 dungeons and these orbs (or similar rare items with actual use) could also be used as trading currency by stronger players for expressing value of valuable items (once secure trading window is implemented). The idea of drop rate is roughly 0.15% drop rate in t10, 0.075% in t9, 0.05 in t8 and it goes down to 0.01 in t1. It's world drop, so not only dungeons but anywhere and should be announced by sound when it drops and marked on minimap.

I've only seen it three times, but it seems the new event has quite a few shortcomings. My understanding was the Resurgence/Invasion had two goals, get players out into the world and give a use to the excess of low level materials and catalysts players had. On the latter, it failed completely, as it ended up only taking equipment. I'm not entirely sure it will succeed on the first goal either. It sounds like we wanted "Rifts" from the game Rift, which we didn't really get.

Oddly, this proposal seems slightly similar to Diablo3's "rifts", maybe closer to Path of Exile's "maps"? I think it has potential, though I'm not really sold on the power corresponding to where it was used. Rather, it seems more likely to be based off where the drop was found. I do like you also try to address another issue with world drops: missing them completely when they are dropped outside the players vision radius.

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- imprints can be crafted. Players will require a lot of given tier materials (as you know, each imprint has tier of gear it can be used on) and Empty Scroll. Empty Scroll is new item that can drop from instance bosses (0.5% per tier, t10 is best for this as it has 3 bosses). It's also guaranteed reward for the final quest in the daily quest chain (can be done once per account per day).

Maybe. I'd like to see the random 5% chance from any item removed. I can't believe that T1 "vendor" farming was an intended playstyle. I'd rather see that removed and the drop rates on affixes increased. Have to wait and see if the resurgence events bring more imprints into the economy when the AH returns, but I don't think so.

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- Auction House disabled. Also create secondary table where you log all dropped and crafted items with some unique item id. If the server ever sees event where player is dropping or re-rolling item that has not unique id or is missing in that table (source is unknown) or the timestamp seems to be off, just remove that item from game and mark the account for investigation. This might be bad idea, but if it seems to be hard to have one system working well, it makes sense to me to create another monitoring layer that makes sure that if cheating happens, it's detected and resolved immediately.

- instead of AH, create working trading window that allows exchange of any items the two parties agree on.

I think the auction house is part of their vision, so I'm not sure how they would feel about its permanent removal. Before this were considered in favor of a peer to peer trade alternative, I think a lot of work would have to go in to improving the communication options in game. If you played Diablo2 in its heyday, I'd hate to see a third party site like D2jsp pop up because of inadequacies.

If feasible, a unique id for all items seems like a good idea. At least while duplication of items seems to be such a rampant issue. I'd assume this is what Diablo 2 did. And when two items had the same id within the same game, one or both were destroyed. Hence why people saw their Windforce disappear when entering a game with another duplicate. I'm not sure where the check would be performed here, since there are more players per game. If this is at all possible, maybe at log in? Also, since many duplicates are accidental, it may not be a great idea to destroy them automatically. As suggested, flagging for investigation may be the best possibility.

For HauteBananas idea:

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Other suggestion would be to remove buying keys from npcs and disabling the key quests. Instead, have keys drop at a %rate from normal monsters in each region, and have the elites give a slightly higher % drop chance. This would actually give an incentive for players to kill stuff around the map vs in dungeons the entire time.

This is a pretty good idea. It seems like it has a high chance of bringing people into the Heartland zones, what the Resurgence was intended to do, and seems relatively straight forward to implement compared to other suggestions. As it stands, I don't really like the scroll quests, but I did like someones suggestion awhile back about turning them into multi-stage "Hunt" events. I'm not sure what the possible reward for something like that would be.

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As BreadSlice had many comments, I can say I understand and agree with most of it if I was looking at it with eyes of new players who doesn't know everything about the game and especially the endgame.

1) Concerns of inflating Silver. Right now, Silver works quite fine until tier 8 and is still acceptable around tier 9. But there is no source of Silver for tier 10 players, yet the prices of re-rolls skyrocket. With 150k needed just for single re-roll that ends with random result we are already in 6-figure area and to roll entire set of 5 items to what you want thanks to the RNG you need probably around 30 million Silver. The suggestion I made is not to inflate it, but to fix it. A lot of players including me would be farming right now and working on the tiny upgrades if we coiuld farm Silver more efficiently. The only way is now to farm t9, where you kill everything in single shot and solo kill boss in 3s while getting average of 1 item worth of 10k Silver per run. To get 30 million, you need to do roughly 3000 t9 highly repetitive runs. No way... As Kate explained me in PM, the team is looking for making this more balanced, but it's been weeks and nothing happened.

2) Experience gain right now is fine. My suggestion to increase it is offsetting the difficulty increase in the other point to keep the leveling speed same as it's now. So really no change happening or being suggested here if you understand.

3) Bloodstone injection on first day added millions of bs to economy. As long as most of it remains in the economy, best way to get some will be by trading (once AH is working again) as there is more supply than demand. The suggested 10 bloodstone per instance would be fair according to other available sources and if they wanted to limit it, it's pretty easy to just get inspired by my suggestion instead of accepting them as I say. Just change it that only first dungeon chest of any unique t9 dungeon you open on any day gives you bs or something like that:) There is 7 such dungeons and it would give players reason to go other dungeons not only when they need relic. Also the rewarded amount was based on price of items in bloodstones (mostly the gems, one-time use colors and re-rolls as I think that 6 per attempt is too much and either would remove this requirement or add more bs sources as I suggested).

4) The T1 dismantling is terrible and annoying. Would be way more fun to let players craft it and create demand for this new required ingredient.

5) Duping check. I think best way is to do single check during dropping (on ground from your bag as attempt to trade it) or re-rolling (so you cannot turn it into different item after being duped and try to trade is as unique item). Only if it's done there (just one extra safety operation, no loop) it can prevent further damage, especially to the buyer.

6) The Deep Night.... well, this is something I would love but I agree that nonstop it might be not good. So maybe it could be that deep night is one day in the week or something like that instead of one week in a year.

7) Increasing health and damage of enemies would simply make it much harder... this is mostly solution to fix current situation where we are missing any endgame to play until new content arrives. What I meant by saying that game can be finished in single day on new account is that if you know the game and have good avoidance skills, you can skip most of the content and start farming t8/9/10 after 1/3/6 hours in the game. I know there is just few players right now who can do that, but knowledge is spreading fast and I was trying to share our research from beta. Anyway, this suggestion has only goal, to increase the minimum time required to beat the game, while decreasing the time needed for endgame progress. Many of these adjustments can easily be done on the normal server and I would love it as I don't want to fragment the community.

It's just strange the team says that endgame is their priority and then we see Resurgence event with t8 cap and honestly... as players aim for t9/t10 gear to replace anything else, lower tier drops are nothing more than poor source of Silver from vendor. I really wish the team used what the community is offering and created small team of players who would be under NDA and could review changes before they are going live and could give feedback to things they are starting to work on. This will save a lot of work to the team and let them avoid implementation of features that are meant good but will be poorly accepted by players.

Don't take this personally, but some of the things that got into game make me thing like they were not tested at all. Or they were tested only to match to design but not to make sense.

Edited January 11 by DangerCZE

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Hi Danger! I agree with a lot of the points that BreadSlice made, especially regarding concerns with keeping economy balance and not fracturing the playerbase without very good reason - that said, we have considered doing things a little adventurous, like having a PvP server one day... so a "challenge" or "hard mode" server would be a lot of fun for players who really want that extra challenge. I think it would be a lot of fun, maybe it could have its own leaderboards and such, would be a cool place for expert players to test their skills. I think the idea is really cool though and would love to have something like this one day, it would just be a long ways out.

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Hi Danger! I agree with a lot of the points that BreadSlice made, especially regarding concerns with keeping economy balance and not fracturing the playerbase without very good reason - that said, we have considered doing things a little adventurous, like having a PvP server one day... so a "challenge" or "hard mode" server would be a lot of fun for players who really want that extra challenge. I think it would be a lot of fun, maybe it could have its own leaderboards and such, would be a cool place for expert players to test their skills. I think the idea is really cool though and would love to have something like this one day, it would just be a long ways out.

Thanks:) Anyway, could you review some of the individual ideas related to silver, imprints and the shrine event? Some of the features would be nice to have even on normal servers and in near future. This was meant as list of suggestions rather than something that must be implemented all at once. Also only reason for this post is lack of balance which is something that doesn't take that long to do. If you are worried, you can start changing it by smaller values and you can keep balancing it each update as many other games do.